Press - Liguori cleared hurdles to establish niche in sports

"Liguori cleared hurdles to establish niche in sports"
By Dave Shedloski

Ann Liguori never has had a problem competing against men. In fact, she's grown accustomed to beating them at their own games.

As an aspiring athlete at Brecksville High School in Suburban Cleveland, Liguori wanted desperately to play varsity tennis, but there was no girls' team. A mere inconvenience. She simply tried out for the boys' team. As a senior, she was its No. 1 singles player.

"I guess I always understood that hard work got you over a lot of hurdles," she says.

That same attitude has served her well in her broadcast career. Work hard and create a spot for yourself in the game. And don't take no for an answer; change the question.

The question facing Liguori in 1982, when she graduated from the University of South Florida in Tampa with a degree in broadcasting, was "How can a woman break into sports?" She altered the query to "How can they keep me out?"

They couldn't. Liguori owns and produces her own weekly program, sharp Sports Innerview, which appears on Prime Sports/SportsChannel. After seven years, it's become the longest running sports interview TV show hosted by a woman. She also hosts Conversations with Ann Liguori, which began its second season on The Golf Channel April 24 (each new segment premiers on Wednesdays at 9:30 P.m. EDT).

Liguori, who also is the host of radio shows for WFAN in New York and the British Broadcasting Corp., ascended to her current status as a leader of women's sports journalism – or "cable's queen of locker-room talk," according to TV Guide – by becoming one of the most versatile utility players in broadcasting.

She began early, too, acting as host of her own cable show, Tampa Bay Sensation, while still in college. After graduation, Liguori worked for CBS Sports for a little more than a year before striking out on her own.

"I became a free agent," she says with a laugh.

And Liguori caught on quickly to the benefits of this chic, modern-day status. She became a New York correspondent for a new publication called USA Today. She was a producer for ABC radio sports and a statistician for HBO Sports and began work on another seemingly risk venture, an all-sports radio station, WFAN.

Basically, she was crazy about sports. "But women didn't have the opportunities back then that they do now," she says, "so I knew I just had to get as much experience as possible, no matter what it was."

Why sports?

"Sports just always intrigued me. I always loved them, and no matter what I did, I always cam back to them" Liguori remembers. "When I was little, my mom wanted me to be a pianist. I quit taking lessons to join a bowling league."

Liguori doesn't bowl over her guests with a lot of difficult questions, though she's not afraid to broach sensitive subjects when the time is right. "Ann is an aggressive person who has an uncanny ability to make her guests open up to her," says Mike Whelan, The Golf Channel's vice president of productions, who has known Liguori since their days together at HBO.

It's that very ability that prompted Callaway Golf to become a sponsor her Prime Sports program, the first time Callaway has advertised on a regional sports cable network.

"It was a smart buy for us," Julie Davis, Callaway's advertising manager, says. "Ann is very down to earth. She asks smart questions and gets people to relax. She'll pull things out of people that no one else could."

"The interview format, I just love it," Liguori, 35, says. "It never gets boring. The Golf Channel program has been especially fun, because it has allowed me to go into different areas of a person's life. Golf as an underlying theme kind of gives you a window into the soul."

This was revealed to Liguori through her Innerview show. She found many of her celebrity guests were interested in golf, and simply spun off the idea to create Conversations. At the same time, TGC executives were looking for a way to bring a celebrity presence to its fledgling enterprise immediately. She had the contacts. They had the forum. It became a win-win deal.

"Ann has become a terrific ambassador for The Golf Channel." Whelan said.

Liguori, who co-produces both programs with husband Steve Geller, has completed half of the 20 shows she will do for The Golf Channel this year. That's down from 26 shows in '95, when TGC, now with more than 2.3 million subscribers, required more programming.

The slightly lighter load hardly bothers Liguori, working on a year-to-year basis with TGC. In fact, she's accustomed to being a part of growing businesses.

"I started with USA Today when people said a national daily couldn't work," she said. "Then people said an all-sports radio station wouldn't work when I went to WFAN. Now I see The Golf Channel growing, and it's pretty exciting. I guess I've always had good instincts."

Most good reporters do.